I went up to Manchester this weekend to see my girlfriend, she’d just been on a hen do, so we saw that as an opportunity to spend the night in Manchester. As I arrived Sunday afternoon whilst they were still ‘lunching’, I saw it as a great opportunity to get out with the X100 and snap Manchester a bit. The city is superb for diverse architecture, old and new. I only really got about 3 hours to take pictures which isn’t really enough, I’d love to have spent an entire weekend there snapping away, but it wasn’t to be. Overall I’m quite happy with the pictures I’ve taken within the time I had. As always the little Fuji performed well. There were a few instances of searching when trying to focus but I’m not too fussed.

I wrote a post the other day, about taking pictures of ‘the weirdest things‘. I thought I’d follow up on it, mainly because the timing couldn’t have been more appropriate.

The story was, in a nutshell, that you shouldn’t dismiss your shots first time round. I’ve often heard photographers not processing their pictures until up to a year later. Reason being, you look at them in a totally different way when you revisit them. They’re completely new and fresh and so is your perspective. I didn’t adhere to this advice, and probably never will, mainly because I’m incredible impatient and want to edit my pictures before I’ve even got to my computer. It’s exciting. You’ve spent all day taking shots and your dreaming of that one amazing picture that will adorn your wall in a nice frame….’Yes, I took that picture’. I’m going off on a bit of a tangent here so lets bring it back. I took that picture of two wheelbarrows at Whipsnade Zoo last weekend. On first run through my 600 ish photos I completely dismissed it, then again the second time round. I’d processed everything I wanted to and seemed relatively happy with the results. Then, on a final run through of the pictures I saw the wheelbarrows and thought I’d do a little cropping etc to see what it would look like. I took the picture in the first place, so there was intent there. Turned out to be one of my most popular pictures to date. I uploaded it right after writing my blog post and it quickly snowballed. To date it’s had nearly 2k views, in a week, and over 90 favorites and counting.

It just goes to show, you should never write off a picture first, or even second time round. Re-visit your picture in future and look at them with a fresh eye.

It was my girlfriends birthday this week, 29 going on 5. She wanted to go to the zoo for a day out! Fair enough.

I had a great day. We practically had Whipsnade Zoo to ourselves because it’s wet and cold here in the UK. Standard. So, that meant no screaming children, no smudged fingers on glass, no jostling for camera position etc. Lovely.

So, I’m slightly cheating here, the majority of pictures were taken on my Nikon D3100 with a 200mm VR lens. I generally use that for nature/landscape. I’d love to have been using the X100 more, but I simply wouldn’t have got half the shots I wanted with it. Funnily enough it really made me realise just how impressive the little Fuji is. Comparing out of camera jpegs to each other is simply night and day. I know it’s not comparing apples to apples, but still, the X100 is mind bogglingly good. Anywhere here are a few pics from our day out, only the first two are X100 (sorry)…

It’s funny how I find the most random things interesting. My boss said recently, ’you like taking photos of rusty things don’t you’? Yes I do. It’s odd, there’s something that draws me in. Not sure whether it’s texture, colour, history etc. I’m not really sure. There are just some things that I can’t help taking pictures of. Today I saw these two wheel barrows at a zoo. There were two random people behind me commenting on the subject, ‘what on earth is he taking a picture of…’.

This is what I was taking a picture of. Simple, but I like it. The colours are ace!

UPDATE (19.03.2013) - Amazon have reverted to an ‘email for stock updates’, suggesting they won’t be back anytime soon. The good news however, is that DigitalRev have them in stock for immediate delivery, priced at £1038.

The Fuji X100S has hit the shelves in the UK. In my other post regarding UK stock, Fuji hadn’t given a solid date regarding stock coming to the UK. Turns out you can now get it at Amazon. I haven’t looked around anywhere else, I was just having a gander over on Amazon, like you do!

At time of writing it says they have one in stock at the moment and more due in on the 19th March, so the start of next week.

Buy the Fuji X100s Here - currently listed at £1039. It’s also sold by Amazon, not one of the third party sellers. Stock is currently limited all over the world. As I understand it they’ve had some manufacturing issues. So, you’ll need to snap it up!

For most of the week this neglected piano has sat on the opposite side of the street to my offices. I saw it on Wednesday and was desperate to take a picture of it. Every day something happened to it, another key smashed, another empty bag of crisps dumped on it etc. It had quite a lot of character. I like the fact that this piano has probably been around for years and owned by many people. Sad to see that this is where it ended up…

Thanks for visiting my photography blog. I'm trying to only post photos taken with my Fuji X100. This is a superb camera. It's not only a sexy retro number, it also takes superb pictures. I'm by no means a pro but the X100 really does spoil me.